Hi all,
I have an iMac late 2015 27 inch base model with specs -
3.2 GHz Intel Core i5
8 GB 1867 MHz DDR3
AMD Radeon R9 M380 2 GB
I experience really slow compile and index times in xcode.
And because of that I was going to get a RAM upgrade from 8gb to 16gb or 32gb.
I wanted to ask whether this would decrese index and compile times or not?
It will help with a bit with Intellisense (or whatever XCODE’s version of that is), but compile/link times are directly related to the power of your CPU / Number of cores (linking is always single threaded however).
That makes sense, but during the building process, windows’ task manager shows my cpu usage being way below 20%, sometimes hovering around 2-3% the whole time. While the hard drive is at 100% with an average read speed of 3mb/s.
Either there is something serious wrong with my setup, or my hard drive is horribly slow. What do you think is the problem here ?
That sounds like a bad HDD (or lots of sectors are bad which is causing horrendous seek times). 3MB/s is CRAZY slow. Even on an older HDD you should be seeing 50 - 100MB/s. Is this on a USB HDD? If so, try and use a USB 3.0/3.1 port if you have one. If this is an internal HDD, I would look at replacing it ASAP.
The sad part is that this is an internal sata hdd. So yes, it’s definitely dying on me 
Thanks a bunch for confirming.
So the biggest benefit to compiling is probably an SSD - highly recommend Samsung 960 Pro… Crazy fast…
Multiple cores help too - when I build literally all 20 4.5GHz cores are 100%